What Is WordPress?

WordPress as a Content
Management System for Websites: An Overview

WordPress began life as blogging software and has evolved into an easy-to-use content management system. The software that powers WordPress is open source and therefore free. As part of the web design process, it is installed on your web hosting. If you need your website to do things beyond what WordPress offers (for example, present a slide show), there are hundreds of available plugins that extend the uses of WordPress; most of them are free.

What you see when you first log into the Dashboard:

When you click on the Pages link in the left column, the list of existing Pages appears:

You can edit a Page or create a new one:

Posts are created/edited the same way.

Posts are the “Blog” part of a WordPress site. They are organized by Categories. You can have as many Categories as you want. You can use Posts and Categories as a straight-forward blog section, or by putting the links to specific Categories up in your navigation, feature them as parts of your site that you update more frequently, like a “Latest News” section.

You can control your navigation in the Menus section. By dragging and dropping, you can change the order of your links. It really is that easy.

The look and feel of a WordPress website is governed by its theme. The themes used to adapt different websites are well crafted with an emphasis on flexibility, SEO optimization, and security. These themes are responsive, meaning the layout of the website shifts and adapts to the size of the device a visitor is using. To help a website’s SEO rankings, each Page or Post can be tweaked to maximize its SEO potential.